You probably don't have the WEP ciphers enabled. Make sure you enabled the correct crypto options.

Bingo! Just had to find the right one...

I finally got NetworkManager working from Gentopia, and that made it a lot easier for me to troubleshoot by making the key entering process much easier on me
When it wouldn't connect, I checked dmesg and found this:

Code:

ieee80211_crypt_wep: could not allocate crypto API arc4

A quick check in my kernel .config showed that I had ARC4 already compiled as a module, so I did a modprobe arc4, and then tried connecting again with NetworkManger. It's working flawlessly now

Hi, I just wanted to thank you for your hard work on this. I managed to get my AE working flawlessly with WPA after some reading. I'm actually using it under Ubuntu (don't kill me, I use Gentoo too, and I love it), but I know it's all your merit.
I'm glad we have some Spanish developers here doing great things like this.

Ups, sorry. Long ago I talked about this with someone and I understood (wrongly, it seems) it was a Spanish devel that was working on it, and your nick sounds like Spanish, too. Then you are out of my list. Just kidding, thanks again.

/. had an article today on the release of Linux 2.6.17. It mentioned that it includes Broadcom WiFi support (among other things), so I pulled it into my HP L2000 (after verifying that gentoo-sources-2.6.17 was already in Portage), and after a few hours of farting around with it, it's now connecting to the 802.11b AP at work (using 128-bit WEP). The next challenge will be to get it talking to the 802.11g AP (using WPA) at home.

One thing I found, though, that caused some trouble is that the radio can be switched on/off by a Windows-based tool that HP provides. Their "Wireless Assistant" enables WiFi and Bluetooth to be enabled/disabled independently. I normally had Bluetooth enabled (for my mouse and phone) and WiFi disabled (because a wired connection is faster at work), but didn't count on this setting carrying over to Linux. Making sure WiFi was enabled while booted into Windows was what ended up getting it working under Linux.

There is a button above the keyboard that will kill both WiFi & Bluetooth, but killing Bluetooth means my mouse quits working. I found rfswitch, but the ebuild for it fails to build (manual build doesn't work much better, either) and I'm not sure if that project even supports my notebook anyway. Is there some other project that provides a working tool to switch wireless on/off on HP notebooks?

Update: Upon getting home, I tried connecting to a couple of access points (a WAP54G with Linksys firmware running as an open access point and a WRT54GL with OpenWRT running as a WPA-secured access point). At first, the computer would connect to neither. It would connect to the open access point after rebooting into Windows and then rebooting into Linux. After power-cycling and booting back into Linux, it still connected to the open access point. Bringing the interface down with the init script and bringing it back up appears to not work, so it looks like the interface is only brought up correctly at boot. Trying to change the configuration appears to require a reboot, which it shouldn't.

I then did some more experimentation with the RF switch. After booting into Windows, disabling WiFi with the Wireless Assistant, shutting down, and booting into Linux, the computer wouldn't connect to anything. Repeating all of the above, but turning WiFi back on, enabled the computer to connect to the open access point. At least it appears that the computer doesn't need to boot into Windows first before using wireless; the state of the software control on the RF switch appears to be persistent through a power cycle.

On the hardware side of the RF switch, pressing the button to switch off the connection doesn't turn out the light as you'd expect. A KDE popup tells me Bluetooth is disconnected, which I expect. Pings no longer get through to the router. Pressing the button again enables the pings to go through (and another KDE popup tells me Bluetooth is reconnected). It appears that the light is on whenever the WiFi interface is up, regardless of the state of the RF switch.

I still need to try getting it to connect to the WPA-secured access point.

Update 2: WPA turned out to be easier than I thought it would be, and wpa_supplicant also appears to be much more usable for network config than mucking about with things manually. Once it's emerged, include this in your /etc/conf.d/net:

Code:

modules_eth1=("wpa_supplicant")
wpa_supplicant_eth1="-Dwext"

Copy /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf.example into /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf. Edit /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf to include the following line at the beginning:

Code:

update_config=1

Restart /etc/init.d/net.eth1. At first, you won't be connected to anything, but that's easy to fix. Fire up wpa_gui, scan for your access point, double-click its SSID, plug in your PSK (assuming that you're using WPA-PSK), click Add, and wait a few seconds for the connection to be established and IP address to be handed out by your DHCP server. wpa_supplicant appears to have some glitches in the way it handles WEP that I've not figured out, but maybe I can talk the boss into replacing the WAP11 we're using at the office.

The only remaining snag at this point is that I can only connect at 11 Mbps. Windows has no problem connecting at 54 Mbps, so it's not a problem on the AP end.

anyone tried the 2.6.17 driver? It looks as if ndiswrapper is easier and just works with wpa_supplicant. This looks like more work than it's worth. What is the purpose of firmware cutting? Why can't this work like a regular eth0 driver (e.g. reverse engineered forcedeth)?

magfrump:
You probably have an unsupported card. What does lspci -vvn | grep -i 14e4 show?

t35t0r:
NDISwrapper doesn't work on ppc systems, so this driver is better than nothing. As for the firmware, the card doesn't have a "ROM" with built in firmware, it's uploaded on startup. Because this data is copyrighted by Broadcom, it can't be included with the driver, so you need to get it yourself._________________Gentoo PPC FAQ: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-ppc-faq.xml

Has anybody found a work around for >1G ram in amd64
I recently added more ram and now all I get it a kernel panic when I bring the device up
(btw driver works flawlessly in x86)
(4318 chipset so PIO is not an option)

I've got a Dell TrueMobile 1350 Mini-PCI Card, 0x1028 0x0003 that I've been struggling to get working for a while now.

Every time I ifup the card, I face a kernel panic within moments and I can't seem to figure out why. At first I thought it was SMP (Pentium 4 with hyperthreading) but I've disabled that in the kernel, and even the BIOS to try and stop it (similar to the problem in ndiswrapper?).

I'm using the vanilla 2.6.17 kernel, I've read through this entire thread and nothing has helped me resolve this.

Still absolutely no luck. I had my hopes up that 2.6.17 was going to improve things, but this driver just does not work for me. I have a Broadcom 4306, and I have all of the firmware files installed. The interface will go up, everything seems to work until I try to actually connect to an AP (open, WEP, doesn't matter), then the whole thing dies. I've been trying to use this driver since January, and it has never once worked.

I'm giving up now. As of now, I'm going to try to find a mini-PCI card for my laptop that will work without ndiswrapper. I've put way too many hours into trying to make this work. I understand that reverse engineering is hard work and that the driver does work for some people, but it just won't work for me. Which wireless chipsets are best for Linux? The only one I've ever really heard good things about is Prism.

Make sure you are using a 3.x driver!!!
bcm43xx-fwcutter -i driver.sys will let you know!

The solution was to use a 3.x driver version, turns out I was using a 4.x and hadn't encountered any prior warning about doing so. Most of the instructions I encountered used recent Windows system drivers, so I was using the latest from the dell site...

I decided to give it one more try. Part of my problem is nickname has to be set to the same thing as the ESSID or nothing will happen. However, even trying to associate manually, it still doesn't work.

I'm still trying to get my wireless card (Linksys WMP54GS 54mbps) under Gentoo x86. But had a question before I start this approach. Will using this method instead of ndiswrapper make me loose some connectivity?